Storage Companies Consider Online Training

Storage software developer CommVault recently unveiled an online training program intended for employees who perform day-to-day administration and management of the company’s software.

The course content — which includes lab exercises and phone or e-mail access to a course proctor — is accessible from any location and can be reviewed multiple times while the content is available.

“Online training is a mechanism for companies to maintain relative control on expense while continuing to increase the corpus of knowledge within their internal IT community,” said Robert Brower, vice president of professional services and technical support at CommVault.

Such training opportunities can be particularly helpful to companies in the IT storage industry.

“IT storage companies benefit from online training as the training meets a business need for the clients of those companies,” Brower explained. “[It] makes available valuable resources for personnel that work and thrive in an on-demand technical culture.”

Further, online training allows administrators to become effective with a newly adopted product.

“Software tends to become ‘set and forget’ for IT storage customers — if an administrator is forced to spend hours per day either relearning key functionality or nursing an issue along, then the software investment is not [meeting] the anticipated return on investment,” Brower said. “Role-appropriate training early in the adoption of the software is critical to ensuring that the implementation is right on first sight and that there is little ongoing effort to maintain a best-practices configuration.”

In the context of current economic trends, Brower outlined a few key points for storage companies to take into account when considering online training:

1. Doing more with less: “CommVault enables this capability by virtue of its ‘sweet spot’ in managing multiple complex data operations through a single interface,” Brower said.

2. Downsizing: “It’s imperative that outsourced or contractor personnel are able to access information [so they can serve] as replacements or alternatives to those newly sized organizations,” Brower said. “As contractors are never paid to train and are loath to travel at their own expense, access to online training addresses the information gap for contracted personnel.”

3. Increasing employee-retention rates: Offering training boosts employee retention, which is especially relevant given the cost associated with losing key players, Brower explained. “Being able to offer training as a no-cost-for-travel option enables this retention for those critical human assets,” he said.